More
than anything else, clarity of purpose is the most important possession of the
sincere spiritual seeker. What is it
that you are seeking?
Are
you seeking knowledge of something or another, of Self or of God? Or, are you
seeking some sort of experience, an imagined “awakening” experience, an
imagined enlightenment?
Have
you any idea of what “awakening” or “enlightenment” are? Are you seeking something about which you
know nothing?
Or,
are you seeking love, and if love, love of what? Are you seeking to experience yourself as
love, or are you seeking an object to love, whether of an abstraction such as
God or guru, or love of a specific other?
If
you seek knowledge or love, you are in for a tough ride because you can find
knowledge and love everywhere, but unless it is the correct type of knowledge,
or the correct object of love, you will suffer from the proverbial 10,000 cuts
torture.
Ultimately
there is only one kind of knowledge that will satisfy the spiritual seeker: knowledge
of who and what you are, knowledge of the Self.
But
even knowing this does not help much because there are 100,000 books and
scriptures all describing Self from one viewpoint or another, and several
thousands of teachers selling knowledge of the Self or of the manifest or
unmanifest worlds.
But
this kind of knowledge will never satisfy you because it is borrowed knowledge
learned from someone else. It is not
your own knowledge arrived at by your own efforts and of your own devices. Such borrowed knowledge, whether it is of
Christ, Buddha, Nisargadatta, or Ramana will never, ever satisfy you as long as
it is a belief, even a strong belief, so strong we call it conviction.
Worse
than that, there is a great divide through all of spirituality between those
who say there is no self or no separate self, and those who not only claim
there is a Self, but that they experience that sense of self at all times.
I
admit, for most of my adult life I struggled to understand not only what others
meant by the word “self,” but whether I could detect any Self within my
subjective experience. I almost always
fell into the no-self, no-I camp for half a century. For half a century I struggled to understand
not only the many various concepts of self and no-self, but the experience of
Self as a state or an event. For almost
50 years I had no knowledge of Self or self even after seven years of analytic
psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, decades of meditation, self-inquiry, Kundalini experiences,
study under six Zen masters, Muktananda, and Robert Adams. For decades I was lost, clueless about Self
and no self.
In
Zen, which was my beginning point, there is no Self, there is no I, no I
Am. The I and I Am are seen to be just
words and when looking within, no thing, no I can be found. There is no inner entity of Self anywhere to
be found. The only Truth is that there
is no Truth, and the closest to truth one can come in words is expressed in the
Heart Sutra: form is emptiness, emptiness is form; feeling, thought, and
Consciousness itself are also like this.
That is, there is no self-caused enduring substance or entity, for all
such ultimately disappear into emptiness, and beyond that into nothingness—no Consciousness.
This
is a very insecure place. There is no
certainty except of continually unfolding uncertainty, no self, no truth.
On
the other side of the spirituality universe we have the vast majority of
seekers who are utterly confused because of the incredible diversity of
spiritual teachings, most of which contradict other teachings. Many teachings are self-contradictory even
within themselves, so the seeker franticly reads even more spiritual works to
gain certainty rather than to endure the heavy and oppressive uncertainty of
the confused.
What
are these people to do? Read more books
or to stop reading and read the only book that is important: themselves.
The
first was that there is no self, there is no I. Subjectively, in my inner
world, the word “I” did not point to anything.
There was no I, no Self. There was
only a vast emptiness within, no self, and everything happened spontaneously
without an agent.
The
second experience and understanding, was to see that “I” (even though there was
no I) was not touched by anything in Consciousness, which meant anything in the
manifest world or activity and form. “I”
was beyond all, untouched by Consciousness. Consciousness was illusory, a dream
that came to me like a thief in the night, unbidden.
Well,
let me tell you, this knowledge of no self, or no separate self was not at all
satisfying. I as a manifest entity did
not exist in any substantial way. I was
emptiness and form only. The sense of I
was illusory, for no I existed as object to be found.
Thus
I lived in this emptiness for 15 years with the profound knowledge there was no
I, no Self. The profound truth here too
is that there is no love. In fact, all
human emotion is empty as are all relationships.
Then
the most extraordinary thing happened to me: Love came to me, uninvited,
unbidden, and in a way and to an extent I had never experienced it before, and
with it came an explosion of life-energy that filled and awakened the self-knowledge
of sentience within me. I became aware of
of the continual presence of love, bliss and energy that ran through my body
and which flowered as a continuous sense of presence within and around me, that
most assuredly was “me,” “I,” “I Am.”
From
emptiness a bomb of love, energy and bliss exploded in me with incredible
intensity that over time revealed who I was with the utter conviction, not of a
true believer, but of someone who had not believed he had a self because he
found only emptiness inside, or the nothingness of sleep and death, and then to
him was revealed the Self of Ramana, as ‘I-I’ where one I is that of the small
self, the human we always took ourself to be, a piece of sentience entombed in
a bit of flesh, filled with dreams, wants, opinions, etc., but who also was the
Self-of-All, which appeared so huge as to be totally beyond being human; it had
to be divine, the other half of the I-I.
What
had been missing all along, for all those decades and especially in the 15
years after my first awakenings with Robert Adams, was LOVE! Feeling an unbelievably powerful sense of
love ignited my sentience, filled the inner energies with an unbelievable life-force,
bliss, energies and a continuous sense of presence of me as being not body, not
mind, but as sentience itself. As
knowing. As self-knowing and
self-knowledge.
The
key was investigating the inner world with total love so that the inner
emptiness is quickened with the life-bliss energies of the deepest level of
sentience.
So,
you need to see that there are on this path, two self-realizations: realization
of the Self as the Witness, the Absolute, unmanifest “beyond” which can never
be directly known, and realization of the Self as the manifest, as energy,
presence, love, bliss, and the divine.
This
kind of realization is never final, because the forms, the manifest world, our
manifest selves are constantly unfolding, changing, manifesting. Only the Absolute who witnesses all this is
untouched, and after 15 years of being untouched, the sweetness and energies of
the manifest Self elicit such thankfulness for life, gratitude, humility and
grace.
So
I urge you, become clear about what you seek. What is it that motivates your
seeking? Is it just curiosity that there
may be something beyond the world you live in?
Or is there a burning desire to grasp the real? Or is there a burning desire for love, or
have you found all human love relationships wanting from repeated failures?
Assuming
you understand what forces are driving you, what do you do then? Read more
books? Seek a guru? Try to find whatever you are looking for
without any guidance except your own?
If you decide to accept the help
of a guru, the most important thing to discover is what he or she actually
experiences within themselves on a day to day, minute to minute basis. Ask them what their inner experience is. Ask them what they offer you. Do just listen
to their abstract talks about Consciousness, Self, no-self, or methods. Find out whether they can give you what you
seek. Whatever you do, don’t just go to
a teacher and begin immersing yourself into their books, classes and retreats
without finding out what they are offering you and how they plan on helping you
find whatever you want.
You know, I was never intelligent
enough or self-confident enough to ask any of my teachers to discuss their
continuous self-experience, and what they had to offer me as a consequence of
spending time with them. In retrospect,
I was so naïve and truly unquestioning. In
fact, it is incredibly difficult to extract such self-revelations from a
teacher, as they tend to hide behind whatever expectations or projections you
have of them, which brought you to them in the first place. You imagine that he or she has something in
their conscious experience that you want and they can give it to you. But they do not want to talk about their own
experience or what they have to offer because in such clarity, they will lose
many students who want what they cannot offer.
Do
you want bliss and energies? Do you want
love beyond anything you have ever experienced before? Do you want to know who or what you are? Do you want to escape from life and emotional
intensity by abiding in the Absolute, the Witness? Or do you hunger to know and experience
everything? This is the highest
aspiration: to hunger to know both God, yourself as a human, and That which
lies beyond everything.
If
you plan on doing everything yourself, you have a fool as a client, because it
is almost impossible to see through the filters and blinders you have been
raised with. You will continually go
around in circles, never able to leave your box.
